Quotes About Survival

Staying alive hardly qualifies as a hobby.' 'I don't know about that. ...

It took me a while to figure it out, but it was faster after I got around that mental block. Walk or die, that's the moral of this story. Simple as that. It's not survival of the physically fittest, that's where I went wrong when I let myself get into this. If it was, I'd have a fair chance. But there are weak men who can lift cars if their wives are pinned underneath. The brain, Garraty. It isn't man or God. It's something... in the brain.

Donner Party Forsaken, fucking in the cold, eating each other, lost runny noses, complaining all the time like so many people that we know

The world is made up of two classes - the hunters and the huntees.

I have played the fox, now I must play the cat of the fable.

Malay man-catcher.

It's part of a woman's hypergamous nature to always seek the best male that she could get. Warring tribe wins? Then the men in that tribe now become her best option for survival. Men have always been disposable protectors. Women have always selected the best men for survival. Even if that meant becoming a war bride to a conquering army that killed off, or enslaved, their family.

We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment.

You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.

The rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for his life while the fox is only running for his dinner.

We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.

Things exist either because they have recently come into existence or because they have qualities that made them unlikely to be destroyed in the past.

Survival machines that can simulate the future are one jump ahead of survival machines who can only learn on the basis of overt trial and error. The trouble with overt trial is that it takes time and energy. The trouble with overt error is that it is often fatal. Simulation is both safer and faster. The evolution of the capacity to simulate seems to have cumulated in subjective consciousness.

Even if not a single fossil has ever been found, the evidence from surviving animals would still overwhelmingly force the conclusion that Darwin was right.

We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmer to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.

Wild animals almost never die of old age: starvation, disease, or predators catch up with them long before they become really senile. Until recently this was true of man too. Most animals die in childhood, many never get beyond the egg stage. Starvation and other causes of death are the ultimate reasons why populations cannot increase indefinitely.

For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But it does not necessarily hold these monopoly rights for all time. Whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own.

Darwinism is not a theory of random chance. It is a theory of random mutation plus non-random cumulative natural selection. . . . Natural selection . . . is a non-random force, pushing towards improvement. . . . Every generation has its Darwinian failures but every individual is descended only from previous generations' successful minorities. . . . [T]here can be no going downhill - species can't get worse as a prelude to getting better. . . . There may be more than one peak.

Oxygen flooded into the atmosphere as a pollutant, even a poison, until natural selection shaped living things to thrive on the stuff and, indeed, suffocate without it.

Natural selection is a beguiling counterfeiter of deliberate purpose.

The genes are master programmers, and they are programming for their lives.

In a designed economy there would be no trees, or certainly no very tall trees: no forests, no canopy. Trees are a waste. Trees are extravagant. Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition - futile if we think in terms of a planed economy. But the natural economy is not planned. Individual plants compete with other plants, of the same and other species, and the result is that they grow taller and taller, far taller than any planner would recommend.

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.

Putting these three things together we arrive at our own 'central theorem' of the extended phenotype: An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.